This blog exists to support liberatory collectivist activism that is anti-patriarchy, anti-colonialism, and anti-capitalism. It also seeks to center the experiences, theories, and agendas of radical and feminist women of color.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

What's so Revolutionary about being Lesbophobic and anti-Two Spirit?

The image above is from this website, and is a banner made by and to promote the work of COAL: Coalition of Activist Lesbians. (I tried to link to COAL's website, but was unable to even get there.)

Linked to below is a post I think is important to read, for it sums up a variety of problems with the the parts of the Left that are white heterosexual male-dominated. One thing the "gay" rights and/or liberation movement has got to deal with, in my view, is not only the challenged homophobia and heterosexism on the Left, but the misogyny, lesbophobia, and sexism of referring to itself as "Gay" as if "Gay" means "Gay and Lesbian and Queer". It doesn't, in my radical profeminist mind anyway. Making the term "gay" inclusive of lesbianism, is no more progressive than using the term "Man" to define "humanity".

How about we call it "The Lesbian Movement" for a while, just so folks get used to thinking of womyn-as-universal? Or, how about "The Two Spirit Movement" so we can demarginalise, which is to also say centralise, a more Indigenist understanding of queerness? (And who the f*ck uses the term "homosexual" any more, among Leftist radicals??!!) I guess the answer is below.

RCP’s Anti-Homosexual Line: Why Held So Long and Stubbornly?

Posted by Mike E on September 20, 2008

“I was told what apparently others were told - they were busy. Huh? Busy? Denouncing whole communities as hopeless bourgeois because you were busy? Revolutionaries prevented from joining the party; youth told to cease and desist on gay curiosity; having to live in fear that I’d be found and ridiculed because I couldn’t control the bourgeois gay monster inside me. But they were busy.”

* * * * *

Kasama is receiving posts from former RCP members describing the issues that brought things to a breaking point.

The question of why the party’s backward view of sexuality and gay people was so stubbornly upheld for so long emerged as an explosive controversy within the RCP during its 2001 program discussions.

This piece by Xbox mentions for the first time the “closet” that some gay and bisexual people lived in within the RCP — and discusses the RCP leadership’s claim that their bigoted view of gay people survived thirty years because they had been so busy with other matters — involving the U.S.-Soviet comflict war and the development of an international movement. Too busy all through the 1980s AIDS crisis?

This argument (and others) are laid out by Bob Avakian in his conversation with Bill Martin (published as the book “Marxism and the Call of the Future: Conversations on Ethics, History and Politics“)._________________________________Please click here for the piece by Xbox.

For related matters, see here._________________________________END OF POST.